En Route to the Exercise Yard
by crinklescofftrip
Summary: Ivy promised Harley they would go and see Mr. J, though she didn't realize they would have to bust him out of the funny farm to do it. Her mind wanders on the way there. (A quick little fic set in Gotham Girls season 3, episode 1.) Ivy/Harley, Joker/Harley


Ivy had no real way to explain her predisposition toward Harley. Yes, she was pretty, and there might have been a slight chance that somewhere far back in her elevated biology, Ivy still had a weakness for human comfort. But that thought was too disagreeable for close examination, to say the least.

Harley was perched on the edge of the passenger seat next to Ivy as they drove, the wind whipping into her face despite the windshield as their little lime convertible raced down the dark Gotham street. Above the speed limit, of course. No sweet law-abiding citizens should be out this late if they were in their right mind, leaving the roads were a free for all for costumed nutjobs and gangsters. Eying how the wind twirled the jingling bells of the jester hat in her peripheral vision, Ivy acknowledged, _Present company included._

It was hard not to feel disgusted, watching Harley sit through the car ride wide eyed and grinning like a dog that didn't realize they were on their way to get spade, or kenneled. One foot on the breaks, and Ivy could see that senselessly happy expression crash down in unadulterated devastation. If she felt up to trading the current situation for Harley's vocal brand of disappointment. Power was an interesting thing.

Harley's voice came trouncing over the air ripping around their car, "We getting close yet, Red?"

"Do you _see_ Arkham yet, Harley?" Ivy settles her eyes on the round. She doesn't need to see Harley to somehow still manage to pick up on the contented little sigh, almost a sacrilegious offshoot of a sigh and a giggle, that she returns with.

"Just too excited to notice. By the end of this trip!" The hybrid sound came back again, this time more noticibly a giggle. "Me n' my Puddin'!"

"A happy day for both of you." Ivy fully noticed that her hands tightened on the steering wheel. For a second, her glare flicked down to them before snapping back up to watch the road, with little cause to force her fingers to relax, because Harley couldn't _see_ a white knuckle grip under Ivy's gloves, and because she wouldn't _notice_ with where her head was at presently, even if the gloves weren't there at all.

"This is a bad idea," Ivy murmured out loud.

Harley didn't seem to have any problem hearing her. "You _promised_ we could go see Mr. J."

"I thought you meant on visiting day. I didn't know we'd have to break into the funny farm to do it."

Ivy spared a glance off to the side to see Harley's face when she made a response as they drove on, but Harley only leaned back in her seat, a contented smile covering her face.

Ivy had a very limited understanding of Harley's relationship with the Joker, an outlook that she doubted could be traced back to the increasingly plant-like genetic makeup that had already long since silenced the biological call to cohabitation and animalistic carnality. She couldn't understand the magnetic appeal that had Harley aching for him when he went away, anymore that she could explain how Harley summoned up the base tinge of desire that Ivy had no reason, no fathomable _reason_ to still be able to feel for her. She couldn't imagine what the Joker could be like when he and Harley were in private that could outweigh how he was where others could see, to inspire such single-minded devotion in someone who was so charismatic, so beaming, so entirely willing to be underappreciated and flexible—

"RED!"

Harley shrieked as their little car flew into an intersection at the same time that a taxi cab driving opposite of them veered sideways in a most un-legal way, leading to a halt in the middle of the cross streets, when they made a quick little right hand turn on their own route. Ivy didn't so much as flinch, while Harley's hand slammed onto the armrest on her door abruptly enough to be heard. Nor did Ivy balk when the cab driver yelled after them in a rage. She kept her eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. They were almost there.

"Wee! Hang in there, Puddin, we're getting close!" Harley ecstatically echoed Ivy's thoughts after a pause and the scenery changed to something Harley recognized. She leaned across their seats and threw her arms around Ivy and squeezed, and Ivy coolly quashed a lump in her throat that might have burned if it was allowed to grown unsupervised, only showing Harley the same exasperated frown that she had taken to wearing during the whole of their most recent bout in living together.

Harley, of course, was completely inoculated against feeling any withering effects from that look.

Ivy took in her companion's exultant expression in the review mirror as she stayed draped over her shoulder, the angle of her head and the feeling of breath on Ivy's collar bone implying that Harley was smelling her, maybe dosing up for the impending period of separation when she went back to the Joker after the imminent jail break. Even after the moment passed and Harley reclined back into her seat, Ivy found herself with an astounding nothing to say.

Because it made no sense to be jealous. Because she and Harley were not together in any real way. Because the relationship with Joker was hardly anything worth being bothered about to begin with, disgusting, volatile thing that it was, held together by Harley's pathetic, self-imposed dependency. Harley was at her most repulsive when she was at the Joker's side. Ivy wanted no part of that version of her. The part that she _did_ want. . .

Ivy let her line of sight deviate to Harley once again, travelling up the line of her body, adorned in the familiar one piece suit that hugged all of her curves and allowed her complete freedom of movement, up to where Harley's head rested on an arm propped against the edge of the passenger door. This time, Harley actually noticed Ivy studying her. When their eyes met, Harley's smile took on an appreciative gleam, returning Ivy's look with a similar full body once over that might as well have been a caress, that was decidedly at odds with their being en route to break her boyfriend out of an asylum for the criminally insane. Harley made no sense. _This_ made no sense. The heat in Ivy's blood right now made _no sense_ , and Ivy had few to zero ideas for how the situation would end, when she couldn't even put her finger on what made Harley so undeniable to her in the first place. She simpered, and she joked, and she had a cloying little way of summersaulting from one issue to another that made Ivy laugh, whether with her or at her, and kept her interest peeked. It kept that underlying feeling, of being pleased, or being. . .excited, blooming up from the shrunken roots of her humanity whenever Harley knocked on the door of whatever hideaway she holed up in between incarcerations. They had been doing this for so long now, it was never a question that Harley would be welcome, into her hideout, her schemes, her bed. Between Joker's imprisonment date and the day he got out, nothing was off the table.

Which was _fine._ Ivy couldn't say that she wanted anything full time anyway, so what Harley did when she went away with her _Puddin_ was just fine.

Though it made her stomach convulse. Thankfully she didn't need to eat much these days anyway, so that was hardly worth noting. Even if it did come with the specific urge to feed the Joker to one of her man-eating babies, take his slimy attitude and offensive green hair away, break him into pieces or violently vomit on her own shoes. She favored one of the two, if she had to choose. And in her most irrational, usually in the mornings when Harley, always a late sleeper, sprawled on top if her and she couldn't disentangle herself seamlessly enough to get on with her morning pruning, she had inexplicable thoughts. Hopes. She wasn't one for authority, but in this one case she wished that the Joker could disappear into the system and never resurface.

Beside her, Harley perked up.

"There it is! There it is!"

"We're just in time for the male inmate exercise hour." Why the hour was so late, she had no idea.

"Uh, Red. . ." Harley's voice shook as she pointed and said something to the effect of the wire-topped stone wall in their way, and Ivy felt her face twist in a wicked smile. She did love leaving Harl speechless.

"Grab your bells, Harl. . ."

She flicked a seed forward into their path without slowing down the car, and heard Harley make a sound that started out as a gasp as it rapidly grew to maturity, a massive plant with a stem bigger than most tree trunks, and a leaf sturdier than some bridges, and up their little convertible went. . .

The car landed with a slam on the other side of the wall, and then veered in a drunken S turn until they came to a stop. Harley leaped out of the car in an excited, graceful bound before she so much as looked around her surroundings, in a manner that would have made it easy for a guard to taser her within seconds of her landing. Ivy herself stayed stationary in the car for awhile longer. It shouldn't have been so easy to land without speedbumps—or men, as they were properly called. Harley began shouting out her ghoulish boyfriend's name. Ivy craned her neck to take in every angle around them, but there was no one running toward them, no one cowering. There was nothing but a yawning expanse of uninhabited concrete around them, deserted basketball hoops the only shapes breaking up the flat terrain between walls and ward. Not a single inmate, not a guard insight. . . .

The important thing to remember, Ivy told herself was that she didn't have any magic tricks in her corner. She had no reason to feel guilty when Harley turned back toward her with her eyes distilled liquid heartbreak, because it wasn't her fault. If the universe was in the business of granting wishes, Gotham city would have been overgrown a long time ago. . . Ivy got out of the car with her jaw just as slack, looked around with the same, if less invested, level of bewilderment.

"Where are all the men?"


End file.
